History Magazine

Americans have debated the Constitution since the day it was signed, but rarely in its 223-year history have so many disagreed so fiercely about so much. Everywhere there seems to be debate about the Constitution's meaning and message. The Tea Party, with its almost fanatical focus on the founding document, contends that its primary purpose is to restrain the federal government-but does it really say that?

The attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris shocked the world, with many governments coming out strongly to condemn it. There are many people who did not know the events that led to this attack and what followed.

One afternoon in the late 1970s, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing. Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side, and rear poses. Disturbing, because the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual.